Movies

Favorite Films:

These are the films that I can watch over and over again. There are films that have impressed me more one way or another, and that I might, if in a generous mood, be willing to admit are better on some objective scale, but these are my all-time favorites.

His Girl Friday: If I can't be Fred Astaire, can I be Cary Grant? Even as the scheming, conniving, monomaniacal publisher in His Girl Friday, Grant has a panache that I can only envy. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson (in an inspired sex-switch from the original role in The Front Page), Grant's top reporter and ex-wife, bent on quitting her job to go be a house-wife to an insurance salesman in Albany (Ralph Bellamy). Grant will stop at nothing to keep her on the job, and as a secondary consideration win her back. What keeps his character sympathetic is that he and the audience both know that deep down, Hildy Johnson is just like him--she'll go just as far as he would in pursuit of a story, and her dream of a little house with a white picket fence in Albany is just a fantasy that she's trying to sell to herself.

Some Like It Hot: Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are side-splitting as a pair of musicians on the run from the Mob, who in order to get out of town disguise themselves as women and join an all-girls band on its way to Miami. When both of them fall for Marilyn Monroe (in one of her best and funniest roles), the plot, as they say, thickens.

Top Hat: If I can't be Cary Grant, then can I be Fred Astaire? I mean, there's something to be said for the personification of effortless grace, isn't there? This is my favorite of the Astaire/Rogers movies--the best Irving Berlin songs ("Cheek to Cheek", "Isn't this a Lovely Day to Get Caught in the Rain", "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails"), the best dances, the best...well, the best of everything.

My Man Godfrey: Carole Lombard, searching for "a forgotten man" for a scavenger hunt comes across William Powell, and gets more than she bargained for when she makes him the butler to her eccentric family. Along the way she finds that money isn't everything, and things aren't always as they seem.

Duck Soup: The most ferocious and unrelenting of the Marx Brothers comedies, and this one without the sappy love-interest to drag it down. Groucho plays the leader of a nation who leads it pell-mell into war and ruin. What a comedy! Hail, Freedonia!

The Great McGinty: Wonderfully cynical political comedy, in which Brian Donleavy plays a bum who rises to governorship as the tool of a crooked political machine (run by Akim Tamiroff), and then blows it all when he tries to perform one honest act.
The Lady Vanishes: When the old lady sitting across from her vanishes from a moving train, Margaret Lockwood gets drawn into a world of espionage and intrigue. Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford (as the twits Charters and Caldicott) are my favorites--and I'm apparently not alone, for they were to reappear in the same roles in other movies, and eventually star in their own mystery novel (called Charters and Caldicott, of course).
The Philadelphia Story: Jimmy Stewart won an Academy Award, but didn't get the girl (well, Cary Grant was the competition). Oh, but she's yar.
The Adventures of Robin Hood: This is it--the perfect adventure film. Some may prefer Gunga Din (and I can hardly fault them--I mean, it does star Cary Grant, and all), but for my money this is the ne plus ultra of the field. Errol Flynn is the perfect hero, Basil Rathbone is the perfect villain. Buckle your swashes, and hang on!

The Big Sleep: There's a story that the screen-writer, William Faulkner, confused as to who was supposed to have committed one of the murders in the film, asked the author of the story ,Raymond Chandler. Chandler admitted that he didn't know, either, did it matter? Fortunately the answer is that is doesn't matter; The Big Sleep relies on mood, pace, crisp dialogue, and stunning star-power to carry off the canonical noir film.